Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Images for stereoscopic viewing may be composed of an image for the right eye and an image for the left eye. The observer may typically use special glasses that make the right eye see only the image for the right eye and the left eye see only the image for the left eye, thereby giving the observer the perception of a three-dimensional scene. There may be two typical methods for transmitting image data for stereoscopic viewing. The first method may involve sending both left-eye and right-eye images, which may result in twice as much data as normal 2D-image data being transmitted. The second method may involve creating a depth map from a left-eye image and a right-eye image and then transmitting the resulting depth map together with either the left-eye or right-eye image. The recipient of the data may use the depth map to recreate one of the two images that has not been sent. The second method may also result in a larger amount of data than normal 2D-image data being transmitted. Further, the need to generate a depth map at a transmission side may impose additional computation load.